Cargo Culture

If we high-brows were really interested in 'world cinema', we would be following things like this:

 

If I am hearing correctly, the voice-over assures of Ramon Film Productions that 'We do our best to stun'. How nice it would be to hear such an earnest avowal of striving, towards a goal evidently out of reach, from Disney, Pixar, or Universal! Of course, Ramon's 'best' is constrained by its microscopic budget, yet does Tebaatusasula not stun at least as much, in its own way, as any Paul Greengrass feature?

What is stunning, to me, is that the basic form of the action feature is retained in the absence of any of the means that in Hollywood --or even in France, Russia, or China for that matter-- would be considered necessary for pulling it off. Even fragments of language from the old social context of movie debuts ('Coming soon!') are deployed, regardless of the fact that there are almost certainly no movie theatres at all in Uganda (for comparison: there were, at last count in 2007, only 13 left in all of Romania), and in this sense what it is for Tebaatusasula to 'come' is something entirely different from the comings that first breathed the life of anticipation into that phrase. Yet the phrase lives on, as do the conventions of exploding cars and karate kicks.

There seems to be, I want to say, no clear boundary between adoption of conventions and imitation of conventions. This fact should cause us to reconsider the conventional understanding of the cargo cult phenomenon, and perhaps also to conclude that something very much like the cargo cult is at the root of all cultural diffusion. The primary instances of cargo cults --airplanes carved in balsa wood by tribespeople, entire life-sized models of airports complete with runways erected in the highlands of New Guinea, and so on-- were distinguished by the fact that the things made by the members of the traditional society in imitation of the technologically more advanced invaders did not function, did not fulfill the same ends as the things of which they were imitations. The wooden airplanes did not fly, and there does not seem to have ever been any expectation that they would.

But many products of the dominant global culture --e.g., movies-- have a function that is far less easy to pinpoint than that of an airplane. Moreover, airplanes themselves fulfill many other functions than flying: they also serve to project an image of modernity, or wealth, or prestige. These are functions that are also fulfilled by movies. For the past several decades, Hollywood has had a near monopoly on the power to project in this way, and it is of more than just aesthetic interest (in fact it is of very little aesthetic interest) that China now has blockbusters, and even its own version, so it is said, of Steven Spielberg. Uganda, for now and for the foreseeable future, can only imitate, can only produce semblances of the products of Hollywood without any of the projective force that the studios enjoy. I don't see any fundamental difference between these semblances and the semblances of runways in New Guinea.

If the cargo cult is not distinguished from the 'real thing' in view of the functionality of its objects, perhaps instead we should look to the system of licensing or legitimation by which products of human industry are recognized as being the sort of products they are. Folk-healers are non-doctors in part because their remedies are generally less efficacious, but also simply because they are not licensed. (Village sages, similarly, are non-philosophers in part because they are less rigorous than members of academic philosophy departments, but also because they do not belong to the same professional bodies, and do not move on the same conference circuit.) A Congolese airport that is blacklisted by the IATA is from an official point of view only a 'semblance' of an airport, even though for the moment planes continue (with some success) to take off and land on its runways. 

Cargo cults are all over the place. Graduate students write research papers that are imitations of journal articles; adolescents have 'relationships' that imitate marriages without the full official recognition of society and all the rights and responsibilities that come with this recognition; and so on. Sometimes these imitations develop into the 'real thing', sometimes they don't. But if they are able to cross over, this will be mostly because of a licensing action on the part of the people or institutions with the projective power to determine what counts as, say, an article or a relationship, rather than as a result of internal transformations of the imitative project.

I note also, no doubt with excessive honesty, that jehsmith.com is itself an extended exercise in cargo-cultism. What I would really like to be doing is writing for the London Review of Books. But no one has yet invited me to do so, and so instead I sit here on my primitive island and churn out, in the form of mere electronic 'posts', semblances of the articles I see printed on paper, issuing from the great Metropolis across the ocean.

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Comments

[Picador]

It's a well-worded thesis, but I wonder whether a hard distinction can't be drawn between those endeavors wherein one can successfully "fake it til you make it" and those wherein "faking it" is in fact a movement away from "making it".

Hobbyists and enthusiasts can become experts and/or become licensed practicioners to the extent that their enthusiasm eventually leads them to seek resources -- instruction, official sanction, etc -- outside of their own domain of knowledge and culture. But some phenomena that resemble cargo cults are in fact founded on the active rejection of foreign authority, and aim to erect an alternative to the system of authority which created the original phenomenon being copied. For example, Intelligent Design Theory is a sort of cargo cult, employing an imitation of scientific forms in an attempt to imbue mythology with the social authority -- and perhaps even the predictive power -- of science. But it's difficult to imagine the embrace of the pseudo-scientific forms of ID to be a springboard toward disinterested empirical inquiry -- the only reason the movement exists at all is to stand in opposition to actual science.

[Justin Smith]

Thanks Picador. I'm very interested in both cargo cults and ID theory, but I'd never noticed the similarities until you brought them to my attention.

I think young earth creationists, with their baraminology and stuff like that, are certainly running a sort of cargo cult, in that they've borrowed the veneer of respectability from the higher-status scientific establishment they oppose. ID theorists in contrast --at least if they're being forthright about their views-- are really more guilty, I think, of failing to keep their activities straight. I think the teleological argument for the existence of God is interesting and worthy of discussion, but that doesn't mean it has a place in any biological research program. Back to the young earth creationists, though: it seems to me that for them 'making it' would mean coming to occupy the positions of power that are now mostly occupied by real scientists, which would enable them to make decisions about the content of textbooks and so on. It's true that this would amount to a displacement of their adversaries, but still it doesn't seem to me fundamentally different from the way, say, graduate students (eventually) displace their mentors. It's all imitation followed (if the imitators are lucky) by displacement. The big difference is that the grad students do a much more thorough job of getting inside the roles of the people they are imitating than do the creationists or the classic cargo cultists in New Guinea.

[Picador]

I think I agree with you about "imitation followed by displacement" being the fundamental dynamic at work in all of these situations. In evoking Creationism and ID, I was grasping for an example in which at least some of the functions of the predecessor simply CAN'T be continued by the imitators, because the imitators have rejected the core substance of their predecessors' practices while retaining only their forms.

I think that what I had in mind was a trend I've seen from time to time in conservative religious discourse whereby the underlying rigor of science (and even engineering) are rejected as unduly rational, or worldly, or counter-revolutionary, or whatever term gets used these days. There's a desire to imitate and displace, yes -- but it's accompanied by a complete lack of appreciation for the accumulated knowledge of the field and the arduous training required to acquire even basic skills in the discipline. While these imitators could achieve (indeed, have already achieved) the social authority that was perhaps their primary goal, they simply won't be able to replicate the technological products of technical and scientific rigor, because they've rejected the actual substance of the disciplines they've been imitating.

But I sound like some kind of bitter atheist technocrat, and that's not really what I'm trying to get at, so maybe I can come up with a better example. In fact, re-reading your original thesis, I've started down a totally different train of thought, one focused on the ostensible functions of the cultural phenomena in question, and so not really addressing what was interesting about your post.